There are many different ‘genres’ of blog posts. Here are some of the main types:

List Posts

These blog posts have titles like ‘7 Things To Check Before You Hit ‘Publish’. They're easy to write and easy to read.

Tutorials and Guides

These are in-depth blog posts that cover an entire topic in depth. The article you're reading is a 'complete guide'.

How-To Posts

These are posts that show you how to a do a specific thing, such as create YouTube Header Art. They usually contain step-by-step instructions and lots of screenshots.

Interview Posts

Interviews with experts in your niche are a popular type of blog post. They’re quite easy to write, as the content comes from the expert responding to your questions.

Roundup Posts

These are a variation on Interview Posts. Ask a range of experts in a particular niche to give a one- or two-paragraph response to a simple question. Then compile their responses into a blog post.

Review Posts

These posts compare two or more products and tell the reader which is best and why. These are great posts to write if you are marketing affiliate products.

Top 50 Posts

These are posts where you identify the top 20, 30, or 50 (etc) experts in a particular field. Provide a brief description of what each expert specializes in or writes about. And that’s your article. These posts are very effective in earning backlinks. The experts you mention in your posts will often include a link to your post on their ‘About Me’ page.

Always try to leave a gap of time between writing and editing, as they are two different processes. Editing requires a different mindset to writing.

First, use the spell-checker in Microsoft Word. But be aware that it won’t pick up all your errors. Your text may contain words that are correctly spelled but shouldn’t be there, such as ‘bog’ instead of ‘blog’ or ‘their’ instead of ‘there’.

Next copy and paste your text into the Hemingway Editor. This is a great tool for cutting out ‘flab’, words that are not needed.

Hemingway picks up 5 types of errors:

Unnecessary adverbs

Passive voice

Complicated phrases

Sentences that are hard to read

Sentences that are very hard to read

How To Edit Your First Blog Post

Hemingway will detect errors that slipped through Word’s spell-checker:

How To Edit Your First Blog Post

When Hemingway marks a sentence in yellow, you can usually cut it into two shorter sentences. If you have a tendency to write long sentences (as I do) this is really helpful!

How To Edit Your First Blog Post

The Hemingway Editor also detects adverbs you don’t need:

How To Edit Your First Blog Post

Using this tool, you’ll end up with shorter sentences and much tighter language.

And that’s going to make your article easier to read.

After passing your text through Hemingway, put it through the free version of Grammarly.

This is another great tool. It will pick some of those typos that the spell-checker missed:

As you may have gathered from this article, I rely mainly on SEO to promote my blog posts.

I lean much more toward SEO than social media as a way of promoting content.

Why?

Because when you post something to social media it has a very short lifespan. And then you have to do it again, and again.

But with SEO, once your article gets on Page #1 of Google, it can stay there for months, even years.

The other thing I like about SEO is it brings you targeted traffic. When someone finds your blog post in Google search it means they had a problem. And your article addressed that problem.

That’s not the case with social media. People don’t see your content because they were searching for it but because it came up in their feed.

That said I make it a habit to share my new articles on Twitter and Facebook.

I also use Twitter to let people know that I mentioned them in my article. They usually share my article in return. And that helps the SEO of the article, as social media shares are most likely part of Google algorithm.